Just
the transparent atmospheres to make me nebulous, shivering, excited.

One
night of off season I met sulphur and suffering.

Botanizing
the night suns, midnight and the moon restored the lost love hibernating
in the fantastic caves.

#2

The
delicate hours offer terrible frame sets to appease their phantasms
and to defy the gods.

Growing,
the nights derive along the blue channels and the limpid currents
fluctuate according to the body battles.

The
winter rushes on the shivery gold that the hopes offered us and our
eyes focus on only one target on which neuralgic tiredness settle
and grow.

To
wait no more and to confess one’s desires.

#3

To
deliver the lanes from this evil by attracting it far from the blue
eyes and still to be used as a bait.

A
pot of clay broke and on the ground lie its remains.

The
rain seals the secret thirsts and rebellions.

In
the hands, naked and damaged by the white frost, the shivers of the
destroyed angel sleep.

Putridness
of the spirit, constraint of the body and in a dash of fear the wings
of the angel grow again so that he can be freed once more.

#4

The
days pass without a noise and their torrid silence calls in crime,
with this feverish imagination.

Another
step within cruelty and sweat is erased.

Hours
of constraint, the world collapses under the fibres of the hunger,
this regime of misfortune and fear.

Welcome!

All
leads us to the suffering.

#5

I
AMNESIAS

Black
hole

lapse
of memory

extra
nothingness and nothing in extra

encircle
amnesias.

II
TURPITUDES

To
bore the secrecies of disgrace

and
to lighten one’s spirits full of sulphur by opening one’s
veins

to
pour a rotten blood on the pure whiteness of the good.

III
NAIVETY

To
let oneself believed and fooled by words without degree.

To
leave on the back of the blue clouds

and
never go down again without having low spirits

to
fall indefinitely into the traps of the words distorted by desire,
selfishness and sadism.

#6

Virtual
paradise, will you take us far from the pangs?

Venom
of this fabulous dragon that is being breathed out in our veins,
the pieces of transitory ecstasy dig tombs and build the vaults.

Nightmarish,
Dantesque and without exit, the brown poison gives us thirst and
pushes us to the crime.

Sweetened
odour, acidulous, the evil spell can charm us.

#7

Under
the doors of the night sleep the blue nuances which bury wintry weathers
and are like jails to the low spirits.

And
the serene wolves devour the bloody flesh of the last comers.

Until
the next stage the night will remain whole and under the celestial
domes it will drink the dizzying wine with us.

#8

Satin
moods, scents of cold and wet winter.

Sources
of terrifying shivers under the frozen floods of these enchantments.

And
in the fixed sky all the tears appear and penetrate in the cracks
of difficult passion.

To
stagger in the mysteries of the sources of the cold.

#9

The
sun makes the pretences of happiness gleam and all courage is lost
in the bliss but will our hearts be heated one day?

We
had seen the calmness of the bewitching paradises, but deaf to the
songs of the pagan natives, our red vouges poured blood on the ground
blessed by nature and our hurricanes of iron vomited all the fire
hidden in them.

In
the name of the infidels, we massacred the happy ones and the sulphur
mixed with saltpetre meant well to make us dream, but we only collected
the anger of the masked avengers striking down our disastrous roofs
and condemning us to exile.

Now
that the drawers open and let escape the phantoms and the evil torments,
we are left to heal our pendulum chilblains.

#10

A
DAY OF PEPPER

Sneeze
in gilded sands, delirious secrets of a boy lying on a bed of passion
and disillusion.

Prickly
scent of the crowned spice which makes up in the twisted rooms and
sends the bodies to be cooked on the bloody communion pyres.

The
dogs run after each other in the streets of Death and the gipsies
show us their hands to read in ours and discover the tortures.

#11

Laws
of fear,

of
our in-coldings,
long living and hateful.

Let
them flee us so that the sweet spirit is released and remains far
from us for his safety.

Tired
of the long road which carries it out where nothing dies no more,
where nothing suffers no more

and
where the furious men are expelled under penalty of ending in broth,
the serene, sweet spirit devours the existence and the children with
tender flesh.

#12

To
smell the refrigerated savours of the past and to feel the ice-cold
water of an sweetened night on our skin,

singing
the pleasure which makes us quiver and fidget

To
cross the years within a phantasm which takes us all our free time
and to lose freedom, independence in the arms of desire.

To
shout our pleasure and to let escape the hot venom which will appease
us.

The
Pendulum Chilblains — 1995. (Translated
2006, corrected 2011.)

Walter
Ruhlmann was
born in 1974 in France. He currently lives in Mamoudzou,
Mayotte where he works as an English teacher. Walter lived
in England from 1995 to 1997. He began publishing Mauvaise
graine, a
literary magazine, in 1996, now known as mgversion2>datura. Back
in France, he has carried on publishing and writing mostly poetry,
although he has published short-stories in several French-language
magazines. He is the author of several poetry booklets and
has published poems in Magnapoets, Poetic Diversity, Aesthetica
Magazine, Ygdrasil and Above
Ground Testing. He
co-edited and translated poems for the bilingual free verse and
form section for the anniversary issue of Magnapoets in
January 2011.